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Some of the most thoughtful work on the topic of climate change appears in Jamais Cascio’s new e-book, Hacking the Earth. Cascio is a Bay Area futurist who worked with Global Business Network during the 1990s and is currently a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a global futures strategist at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
This review by Bob Olson, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Alternative Futures, originally appeared in The Futurist.
Big Ideas for Saving the Earth
The actual pace of climate change seems likely to be faster than in even the gloomiest scenarios in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Assessment Report, Cascio notes. Greenhouse gas emissions increased much more quickly than anticipated before they were trimmed back by the global recession. Higher temperatures are now expected to trigger self-amplifying feedback effects that were not taken into account in the 2007 report, such as melting permafrost in the Arctic releasing large amounts of methane, which is 20–25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Recent research also suggests that the world’s oceans have less ability to moderate global warming by soaking up both carbon and heat than previously estimated.
Meanwhile, few political leaders understand the scale of effort needed to prevent dangerous climate change. Accelerating climate change and weak political responses are leading a growing number of people to conclude that we need to seriously consider the possibility of using geoengineering to offset and temporarily delay global warming. Major articles on geoengineering have recently appeared in publications ranging from NewScientist to Foreign Affairs.
While geoengineering technologies are the context for Cascio’s book, they are not the focus. For his purposes, all we really need to know is that geoengineering schemes to damp the greenhouse effect range from low-tech to sci-fi, and they all work by either reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface or by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in the oceans, plants, soil, or geological formations. . .
Imagine for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals in certain locales are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.
Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in human population growth. These geographically localized data need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world's human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules.
Perhaps a "scope of observation" problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers.
Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the propagation numbers of the human species (the wave data) or localized reproduction numbers (the molecular data). Data regarding the propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while individual or localized reproduction data are the latter.
From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many places, appear to be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide.
In the year 1900 world's human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 41 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world's human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process is to occur.
We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people for the 150 year period between 1900 and 2050.
Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world's surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth's resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems.
For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond.
Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to unchallenged scientific research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms.
To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right.
If I may continue by introducing an extension of my perspective.
According to the research of Russell Hopfenberg,Ph.D., and David Pimementel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this recent, astounding growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misperception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more.
Data indicate that the world's human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.
Hopfenberg's and Pimentel's evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continue to result in even greater human population numbers.
The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable.
Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially similar population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many "civilized" human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their food production capabilities.
Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, "primitive" human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.
Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment's physical capacity to sustain them because global human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human organisms; and, in one and all cases, no food equals no humans.
Thank you.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
One thing I never see in all the talk about feeding the starving and other such works fails to talk about the artificial bottlenecks to such aid. You could probably feed the world on what's produced now, except for the presence of regimes who purposely stop it from being delivered. Aid worker agencies, such as MSF, face violence and institutional graft that prevents food and medicine from getting through to places that need it.
The idea that we need to increase production, rather than acting to remove corruption bottlenecks, really fails to see the whole picture.
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